The Sentence – Louise Erdrich

The Sentence – Louise Erdrich

My local library recommended this and I had read La Rose, so I thought I would give it a go.

Here’s the blurb …

The Sentence asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book.

A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she simply won’t leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls’ Day 2019 and ends on All Souls’ Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

This book slowed me down (as you can see by the length between posts). It is set during 2020 and I enjoyed the Covid and BLM (Black Lives Matter) references. Ghost stories are not my thing (even if you can read them metaphorically). I loved all the book talk and the list of novels at the end. It is about story in all its different forms (and family).

A review

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